How Breathing Can Help Reduce the Risk of Chronic Diseases | Niraj Naik | SOMA Breath®️

Let's talk about breathing exercises to prevent diseases.

Remember to subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications button so that you never, ever miss an episode. There are two distinct types of diseases. There are chronic diseases. These are ones that are associated usually with lifestyle. And a small component is genetics as well, which can take years to develop. These are things like inflammatory conditions, arthritis, asthma, autoimmune diseases like colitis, type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes, cancer, okay? These are all things that usually take a long time to develop. Then there's acute diseases or infections which are usually from like viruses, bacteria, which can actually.

Cause a dramatic disturbance, your immune system. And you can actually, it can eat away like a bacterial infection can eat away at your skin, or a virus can cause a lot of problems, nerve damage, and all sorts of issues from within in a very short space of time. There's a big difference between acute chronic disease, okay? So acute diseases, infections can actually be prevented by very simple breathing exercise. And that's just being mindful of normal breathing. And although we can't make any claims that you can cure or treat any acute infection, okay, There is enough evidence to suggest that you can definitely reduce your risk by taking control of your breath. And the first simple way is to understand the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing. When you breathe from your mouth, okay, you firstly, you disrupt the oxygen carbon dioxide ratio in your system and this causes stress, especially if you breathe into your chest, okay? But your nose is what's designed for breathing. When you breathe into your nose and into your diaphragm, okay, Nasal breathing, you actually produce nitric oxide. And nitric oxide has been shown in numerous studies to be antiviral, antibacterial, antimicrobial, it's an anti inflammatory. It's also, it reduces blood pressure. It's vasodilator, it's a bronchodilator, and it's a, it's a remarkable gas that we only produce when we nasal breathe, okay? So just switching from mouth breathing to nasal breathing can help you from getting things like cold flus and other viral infections that may be floating around. And also nasal breathing and taking control of your breath. All the things that we talk about in our SOMA breath courses will help you improve your immune health. And immune health is paramount to fighting off acute infections, so that if you do get an infection, it doesn't last that long, your body knows how to deal with it, and then later on, you, you have immune, natural immunity to that infection.

Now, chronic diseases, on the other hand, is a whole different Matter chronic diseases, which are usually a result of poor lifestyle or stress, emotional stress, trauma, things like that, that can take a long time to develop. You need to take a more holistic approach. But the breathing, I would say, is very, very important, if not the most important first step to taking control over this. So I'm somebody who's. I had an autoimmune disease years ago. I managed to overcome ring using. Pranayama was one of the big parts of it. Pranayama is just a branch actually of yoga, the entire yoga system. It's a holistic system designed to help you stay happy, healthy and strong and resilient to stress and at your best so that you actually don't get sick, you live a longer time. Okay. And it was developed by studying animals in nature. They saw a relationship between animals that live a long time and their breathing rates versus animals that don't live a long time. Okay. And how they breathe. So animals that don't live a long time, like rats and mice, they actually only live.

Up to a year. And they have very fast breathing rates, up to 150 breaths per minute. Okay. Animals that live a very long time, like elephants, turtles and whales, they actually have very slow breathing rates, like less than four breaths per minute. Okay. And a whale, for example, can live up over 200 years. Okay. But there's some weird anomalies to this whole rule. The naked mole rat. The naked mole rat lives primarily underground in a hypoxic condition where it has low oxygen environment and it can hold it breath for a up to 18 minutes of time. And guess what? It lives up to 30 years free of disease. That's remarkable. So scientists even tried to give it diseases and it, it doesn't get disease. It's really hard for it to make it sick. And also it's. It's like it's defied aging. The aging process has reversed it. So.

What is the difference here? Well, it's how it holds its breath and its ability to use oxygen. Same thing goes for whales. Whales can hold their breath for two hours at a time. That's right. So there is a relationship from yoga with breath hold times. Your ability to hold your breath, control your breath. And in fact, the most revered technique of all in Pranayama is called kumbhaka to do with your health. Okay. So what they realized with the oxygen, and this is something that at recent times, scientists Helmut sees confirm that oxygen actually.

Causes like a fire in the body. And when it combusts, just like it does in a combustion engine to Produce that energy that drives an engine. We have like a super efficient engine of our own. It actually can cause some damage and wear and tear in the form of free radical damage, oxidative stress. And actually, if you have oxygen bound to your red blood cells and it's not going to tissue cells, you can get rusting effects of your arteries that can lead to blockages and then heart disease and heart attacks. So by actually being very efficient, using oxygen, slowing your breathing rate down, okay? And extending your ability to hold your breath, okay? It shows you one very important metric that is your efficiency of using oxygen and your body tissue oxygen levels, okay? Which is really, really, really important.

Okay? So this is how oxygenated the cells of your organs and tissues are.

And if this is disrupted from over breathing and being stressed out, okay? Because you need an important ingredient to get the oxygen off your red blood cells and into those cells, which is carbon dioxide and also nitric oxide. If you don't have, if you disrupt that balance, that bore effect is called, okay? By over breathing, you're going to not get adequate oxygenation of your cell. You need the right amount of oxygen actually to produce energy. And there's a scientist called Helmut Sees who coined the term oxidative stress. Although it's very difficult to live without oxygen, also difficult to live with oxygen because oxygen has free radical damage and it also can cause vasoconstriction, narrowing your blood vessels. And also tension can actually cause muscle pain. And all of these things diminishes blood flow and, and oxygenation of your cells, which then leads to disease. Okay? So it's all about controlling oxygen and your ability to use it, okay? And the entire system of pranayama and yoga was designed for you to have optimized use of oxygen. So your breathing rate slows right down to under four breaths a minute if you're going to be like a super yogi. But Even less than 10 breaths per minute is a really good rate of breath for your normal resting breath rate. And what this shows then is that actually through reduced breathing exercises, okay? And becoming efficient and training ourselves to use oxygen, we can actually prevent disease. Now, there's a scientist called Buteyko, you may have heard of him, Konstantin Buteyko from Russia developed the Buteyko method. He did lots and lots of research. He, he tried to fix his own hypertension, but he studied also pranayama and yoga to figure all this stuff out. And he's done lots of great research in it. In Soma breath, we've actually gone right to source and also put the science behind it and developed even more advanced techniques with music and tech and audio technology that makes the whole process more fun and enjoyable. All right. And we also have courses where we go into all of this stuff in much more depth and the exact techniques. I'm going to leave you with a simple technique that you can do. Well. There's two things you can do right now to actually measure your state of health. And then this gives you a metric firstly to measure your progress. And then I'm going to talk to you about our trademark signature technique, the Soma Awakening technique that is going to help you prevent diseases by optimizing your oxygen utilization. So the first method of checking in with your health is the breath hold time. This is your ability to hold your breath comfortably where you're not gasping for air after you've held your breath. And you do the breath hold after the exhalation. So you breathe in, out through your nose. You got to do this in a calm, relax away. Do at the same time every single day for an accurate reading. First thing in the morning is best. Within the first 10 minutes you wake up and you're going to breathe in through your nose. Well, spend a minute just to relax and get into state so you're at normal state and your mind isn't full of thoughts. Then you breathe in and out. Hold your breath and hold it until you get that big urge to breathe. The first one, but not like where you're gasping for air on your next inhale. Okay? Hold it to that point. Your normal. Your inhales afterwards shouldn't be a real struggle. It should just be normal inhales and exhales afterwards. Okay. If you're like needing to open your mouth to inhale again, it means you've gone too far. Okay? Measure that. If your score is under.

15 seconds, it means that there is something going on. Your body's struggling to fight some infection sometimes. Or it could be you're not very tolerant of carbon dioxide is your carbon dioxide levels that teaches your tells your brain to breathe again. So if you can't handle a good amount of carbon dioxide, if your sensitivity is too strong, then what happens is you won't be able to hold your breath very long time. But you can train this. Okay. However, it can also be a sign that things are wrong with your cardiovascular system, especially if your score is under 10 seconds. That's when there's a sickness. And actually under five seconds has been shown to be associated with people who are really chronically sick and they may be about to die. Okay. And you'll find that those people hyperventilating a lot. So when you hyperventilate, you actually disrupt this carbon dioxide oxygen ratio. And you also.

Mean that you don't get the oxygen where it needs to go. Hyperventilation is a serious issue. A lot of people do it naturally when they're under emotional stress. So taking control of your stress, dealing with stress, and then controlling hyperventilation, slowing your breathing down, becoming efficient, using oxygen with reduced breathing techniques can actually prevent chronic hyperventilation from becoming a problem. Especially also if you use your nose rather than your mouth to breathe. Okay, so these are things that are going to affect your breath whole time. How, how you breathe, if you breathe through your nose or your mouth, whether you hyperventilate, whether you're stressed out, all of these factors, you eat the wrong food, the wrong diets, all going to affect your breath whole time. But you can actually start to work on improving your breath hold time. Firstly, you can do reduced breathing exercises. We actually teach a lot of these in our Soma Breath Fit course and in our instructor trainings. Buteyko also has a lot of great knowledge on this and techniques for this. However, with Soma Breath, we also go deep into the power of intermittent hypoxic training and with intermittent hypoxia training, breath based iht, what you're doing is you're delivering a daily dose of intermittent hypoxia. This is a physiological state where you lower your oxygen for a brief period of time. And what this does is it forces your body to adapt to having less than normal oxygen. It also helps you have more carbon dioxide tolerance and it also gets oxygen rapidly going into your cells, of your tissues and your organs, your muscles. Okay, so with this one technique which we've developed called the Soma Breath Awaken technique, which we use music to actually drive the whole process and make the whole thing more fun and enjoyable, combined with guided imagery, visualization, as well as powerful techniques for reducing your oxygen and, and also for creating this intimate hypoxia is profound. We have incredible results of this and we have a whole protocol for this inside our 21 day awakening protocol which you can check out. So if you want to learn more about that, click on the links in the description and check out Breath Fit because that really goes deep into breath hold times. How we can improve this so that you can become healthier, fitter, happier, stronger and more enthusiasm for life. That's right. Click on the link in the description box below this video to get access to the full masterclass where you get lots more free tips and resources. Remember to subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications button so that you never, ever miss an episode.